Note

Schumann’s piano quintet is one of my long-time favorites, and in planning my own quintet to pair with it, I devised a sort of thought-exper­i­ment. What if, instead of writing his piece in monu­men­tal, Beethoven-like forms, Schumann had written in the mode of his piano sets (like Kreis­le­ri­ana or Carnaval)—as a single, large-scale form constructed out of several simpler ones?

The seed of the piece is a four-note figure stolen from some canonic passage­work in his Op. 12 Fantasi­estücke (no. 6, “Fabel”) which I stretch out into a melody and set in a prola­tion canon (indi­vid­ual voices playing that melody at differ­ent speeds). After getting stuck on a partic­u­larly unre­solv­able chord, “Boulder Pushing” reworks that sequence into a churning mass of tremolos that descend inex­orably, gath­er­ing speed all the while.

The piano drops out for the center of the piece (marked “Tenera­mente” or tenderly), a repeated chorale revolv­ing around a B major pole, pushing grad­u­ally outward in volume and complex­ity with each iter­a­tion.

“Lentic­u­lar Postcard” treats the opening canon play­fully, the instru­ments over­lap­ping in groups of three, four, five, and seven, result­ing in a slippery texture which seems to shift depend­ing on one’s focus. The music of “Pyramid Scheme” looks like actual peaks and valleys on the page, a visual and sonic map inter­spersed with gentle recol­lec­tions of previous move­ments.

So the rela­tion­ship between my piece and Schumann is mostly structural—it’s five contin­u­ous move­ments, each of which are based on one or two char­ac­ter­is­tic ideas.